Here’s how to connect your HTC Desire (or perhaps any Android phone) to a Mac via a USB cable so that your computer can use the phone’s mobile broadband connection.

In my opinion, this sort of functionality should be built into the operating system, but I’ll save that rant for another day.

This uses the PdaNet for Android app, which costs USD 23.95 (currently on special at USD 18.95 for a limited time). However there’s a free trial which will suit my fellow reviewers in the Telstra HTC Desire Social Review. You can still use the app after the free trial is over, with the limitation that you can’t connect to secure sites.

Step 1: Install PdaNet Desktop for Mac on your computer

Just download and install the package. You will need to reboot your Mac after the installation. The installation will:

1. Create a new Ethernet interface associated with your USB port, probably called “en2″ or “en3″. When it does this, make sure the interface is set to use DHCP. It should do this automatically, but it pays to check.
2. Install a new drop-down menu in your menu bar.

Step 2: Install the PdaNet for Android app on your phone

On your phone:

1. Go to the Market, search for “pdanet”, download and install the app.
2. Go to Settings -> Applications -> Development and turn on “USB debugging”.

You’ve now got the software installed at both ends, so you’re ready to go.

Step 3: Connect to the internet

1. Launch the PdaNet app on your phone and select “Enable USB Tether”.
2. Plug the phone into your Mac’s USB port.
3. When the phone pops up the “Connect to PC” dialog, choose either “Charge only” or “Disk drive”. Do not choose “Internet sharing” as this start a fight over who’s controlling the internet link.
4. On the Mac, from your new PadNet drop-down menu, choose “Connect” and wait for the icon to stop flashing.
5. Done!

Remember that your mobile data usage is expensive. Telstra’s Next G network is fast. It’s easy to download more than you intended. And uploads count against your usage too — so careful with that streaming video!

This procedure was tested using PdaNet version 2.41 on an HTC Desire running Android 2.1-update1, and a MacBook Pro running Snow Leopard version 10.6.3. Your mileage may vary.

[Disclosure: I have been given a HTC Desire handset by Telstra free of charge to review. The comments expressed by me reflect my user experience and personal opinion.]

Here’s my 5-minute presentation from WebForward@CeBIT last week, on the importance of authenticity when using social media for business.

It’s recorded on a Nokia N80 phone by Mike Seyfang so it’s a bit rough, but you’ll get the content. You’ll also hear me swear a few times because, well, that’s apparently what I’m now expected to do.

One key theme is that if businesses try to micro-manage every aspect of the communication between their employees and the rest of the world — denying that there are mistakes, or that some people don’t like them — they’ll end up becoming paranoid psychotics. I hope to expand upon that in due course.

Mike also recorded the presentations from my co-panellists Hugo Ortega, Kate Carruthers and Nick Hodge, but not Laurel Papworth for some reason.

I did see a “proper” video camera on the day, so I think CeBIT will place higher-resolution video online in due course. I’ll let you know if and when that happens.

That well-respected and mostly-respectable renaissance woman Kate Carruthers has asked me (and four others) this: “And how do YOU decide how/what/when to blog?” Good question, Kate.

Actually, why do I blog at all?

I have four answers, and they overlap.

1. Because I can. I enjoy writing. Sometimes other people seem to enjoy it too, even to the point of paying me money. I gives me pleasure, and I can do it while sipping wine at my local pub. Unlike masturbation.

When I’m writing for pleasure I tend to produce observational essays like Saturday Night at The Duke and Burnt out sofa, burnt out life, or satire like The Inaugural Paul Neil Milne Johnstone Award goes to….

I usually write this material because some vivid observation kicked it off and, after a not-too-long gap, I found a spare hour or two to record the words.

2. Because it helps me understand. When thoughts have been tumbling around in my tumbling mind like so many damp underpants and unmatched socks, essays like Winter Solstice Meditation and Disconnected from Nature help me find the centre. When I’m trying to figure out how to deal with a professional situation, essays emerge like Scaring the shit out of clients and Is it really so wrong to mix business and politics (and religion)?.

Sometimes, though, I just want to join the rest of the human mass and record my personal reactions to major events — like Australia Day in Are you proud of your culture?, mass murder in The Ghost of Cho Seung-hui, or like The compulsory “Sorry Day” post or The Compulsory 9/11 Post.

When I write this material, it’s usually either early in the morning when it’s quiet, or at dusk when the world is winding down for the day. I’ll tentatively put a few words on screen, maybe even a few sentences — then wander around the house, make a cup of tea, play with the cats, walk to the corner shop because I’ve run out of milk, stare at the sky, write another few words, poke at them for a minute or two and repeat and repeat and repeat until it starts taking some sort of shape. Every now and then there’ll be a flash of insight and I’ll blast out half a dozen coherent paragraphs in one burst — then wander around the house, make a cup of tea etc.

I’ll tumble around that loop dozens of times, maybe even putting writing on hold a day or two, until suddenly PING! The essay drops out in a warm crisp burst of lemon freshness.

3. Because it helps me remember. Like Kate, I’ll record interesting quotes, links and observations for later use. I put them into the blog in case they’re of value to anyone else.

4. Because it’s my duty. Somehow, despite my best self-indulgent contributions to long-term brain damage, I’ve ended up with a capable mind which can analyse the world and communicate. Since I’m not one of the breeders whose role is to pass on their genetics, I figure it’s my role to pass on memetics. I do actually think it’s important that my eccentric worldview is recorded for posterity — if only so future humans can point and say, “Stilgherrian was just so wrong, and we must never make that mistake again!”

Umberto Eco (pictured) explained this better than I ever could in the preface to the US edition of Travels in Hyperreality:

There is another reason why I write these things. I believe it is my political duty… In the United States politics is a profession, whereas in Europe is it a right and a duty. Perhaps we make too much of it, and use it badly; but each of us feels the moral obligation to be involved in some way. My way of being involved in politics consists of telling others how I see daily life, political events, the language of the mass media, sometimes the way I look at a movie…

Perhaps I have written these things, and go on writing similar things, for other reasons. I am anxious, insecure, and always afraid of being wrong. What is worse, I am always afraid that the person who says I am wrong is better than I am. I need to check quickly the ideas that come into my head… That is why I like to write for the newspapers, to reread myself the next day, and to read the reactions of others. A difficult game, because it does not always consist of being reassured when you meet with agreement and having doubts when you are faced with dissent… Sometimes you have to speak because you feel the moral obligation to say something…

As Eco uses newspapers, I use a blog. I continue to write pieces on censorship and journalism, as well as more philosophical pieces like Post 801: Kill the Hallucinating Goldfish and Stay alert, ye nameless, toiling animals and “Let’s just write that down…”.

As I said, these four reasons overlap.

An essay like Anzac Day Rememberings is observational, political and personal all in one. I don’t think about the categories when I write. I simply write when I have the passion. Or when Crikey has commissioned something — though that’s usually within my passion-zone anyway.

I should also mention that I draft and re-draft many times. I read everything aloud so I can refine the rhythms. I polish each sentence until I’m happy. And before hitting “Publish”, I usually take a shower or a walk or otherwise take a break so my eyes and ears are fresh before doing one final run-through.

But Twitter is changing everything.

And so is Ustream and Delicious. And so (soon) will Qik.

I’ve almost completely stopped my one-paragraph Notes, as those pithy observations seem to fit more naturally into my Twitter stream. As do links, which I also dump into Delicious to be returned here as Daily Links blog posts (posted only every few days, so sue me).

I’ve also experimented with a new type of Twitter-based observational writing in Gonzo Twitter 1: Saturday Evening in Newtown. It seemed to work. I intend to do more.

Meanwhile some of my political commentary is now in my video program Stilgherrian Live, and as soon as I get a new phone I’ll post to my Qik stream more often.

How do I use all these different media outlets? How do balance these and other demands upon my limited time? NFI. But writing this post is helping — category 2 FTW!

So how do you decide how / what / when to blog?

I tap you on the shoulder, Nathanael Boehm, Nick Hodge, Simon Rumble, Trinn (’Pong) Suwannapha and Zern Liew. There, all in the second half of the alphabet by given name.

With Thursday’s night’s episode the Alpha series of Stilgherrian Live came to an end. What next?

Across eight “proper” episodes, plus a couple of impromptu programs from a local pub and a hotel room in Canberra, I achieved my main aim. I proved that it’s possible to do a live video program on the Internet using equipment I can carry in a backpack.

I got a feel for how much pre-production is needed. I got inbound talkback calls working via Skype. And I was very pleased to sustain a regular live audience of 30-odd people. Thank you.

Recently, thanks to Qik, I was able to broadcast live video feeds from my Nokia N80 phone. They’re still viewable at qik.com/stilgherrian. However the “standard” 3G available in Australia meant the technical quality was pretty average. It really does need HSDPA, i.e. a new phone.

So, given that “we have the technology”, what sort of programs should I create?

The 8-plus-2 episodes of Stilgherrian Live Alpha, all linked off the program page, were a mixed bag. They were meant to be based on a half-hour chat show format, but some weeks I simply didn’t have time to prepare and they were little more than me ranting at the camera. Should I continue aiming at that sort of format, or something different?

Here are the random thoughts I’ve been having, numbered so you can refer to them in the comments:

1. Am I worrying too much about making things look like traditional network TV graphics? Where should I be on that scale of “polished” to “rough”?
2. Can there be different kinds of Stilgherrian Live, including more serious interviews, quick random broadcasts using Qik, the more “produced-up” weekly chat show etc?
3. What sort of topics should I cover?
4. How does this fit with my writing here on the web (both the essays, the link compilations and the random bits), what I do on Twitter and what I do for Crikey?
5. And, given that I only have a finite amount of time, how much of each do I do?

I’ll leave it there for now, because the Snarky Platypus and I will be meeting at the gym shortly. I do have more thoughts, but I’d like to hear from you, my adoring public, first. And then I’ll respond. Comments please!

[I promised Crikey that I'd write something about the Future of Media Summit 2008. This rant is what emerged. You can also read it over at Crikey, where there's a different stream of comments.]

What is the future of journalism? To judge by the discussion at this week’s Future of Media Summit held simultaneously in Sydney and Silicon Valley (and every other “new media” conference I’ve been to lately) it’s endless bloody whingeing. Whingeing about how journalism has standards and bloggers are all “just” writing whatever they think.

The panels in both cities covered the same, tired old ground. The new “participatory media” and “citizen journalism” would never be Real Journalism, because Real Journalism is an Art/Craft/Profession. Real Journalism involves research and fact-checking and sub-editing. There’s a Code of Ethics. But “these people”, as bloggers get labelled, these people just sit around in their pyjamas and write whatever comes into their heads.

Bollocks.

What’s tiring about this false dichotomy is that it compares the highest ideal of journalism with the lowest grade of personal blogging about what the cat did yesterday and — lo and behold! — they’re not the same. Gosh.

How much everyday journalism actually conforms to the high ideal? Not much. For every Walkley-nominated episode of Four Corners there’s a hundred tawdry yarns about miracle fat cures or shonky builders with a camera shoved in their face. For every investigative scoop there’s a thousand mundane little 5-paragraph yarns that merely quote what someone said at a press conference, and then quote their opponent. Or recycle a media release, putting the journo’s byline where the PR firm’s logo used to be. Or misappropriate statistics to beat up some shock-horror non-existent “crime wave”. Or either fawn or tut-tut over some “celebrity” and their antics — more often than not because that same celebrity is appearing in a TV show or movie that’s completely coincidentally owned by the journalist’s employer.

And you know, some “bloggers” actually know what they’re talking about, interview people, and link to their references to boot.

Dear Journalists, how can you spout all that stuff about “standards” and then go back to your mucky business?

Oh, that’s right. You’re a proper journalist. It’s all the others…

Actually, I know why you’re so bitter about “those bloggers”. You worked hard on that student newspaper or street rag while living in uni-student poverty, put up with the abuse of grumpy old chain-smoking subs who bawled you out over trivial spelling mistakes, put up with the unpredictable patronage of editors who promoted everyone else to A Grade but you — you endured all of that hoping that one day you’d get the plum posting. But no! The newsrooms are now being decimated, and the masthead’s adorned with photos of celebrity chefs. And bloggers — bloggers! People with no professional training are leaping into the limelight. Some of them are even being paid! How dare they!

Dear Journalists, in case you hadn’t noticed, the internet and pervasive mobile digital communications change everything.

The shape of your craft and the form of your stories was determined by the technology used to deliver those stories. Newspapers, for instance, worked to their daily cycles, and stories had the length and structure they did, because of the physical and operational constraints of putting ink onto paper. Some bloke called McLuhan said something about this, ages back — but I wouldn’t know for sure, because I’m not a proper journalist. Still, it strikes me that the very industrial scale of printing a metropolitan daily or producing a 6pm TV bulletin also shapes the way you go about making your stories: all that mechanism between you the journalist and your audience.

Well, that’s all changed.

We all have keyboards now. We all have mobile phones with cameras, or soon will. We all have publishing and distribution tools like WordPress and YouTube and Ustream.tv and Qik, or soon will.

We don’t need a third party in The Mainstream Media to bring us mass-produced stories for mass-produced audiences when we can tell each other our own stories. Stories that are directly meaningful to us — like how niece Sarah did so well at the school concert (and here’s a video), or how the factory’s closing down (and here’s the lousy memo the bastards sent us). We’re only just learning how to connect myriad storytellers to myriad audiences, but we’re learning fast.

There’s still a role for Real Journalism, of course, with your research and storytelling skills and, yes, with your Code of Ethics too. No-one’s saying there won’t be. And you know what? You too can use all these wonderful new tools to create wonderful new forms of Journalism — if only you’d stop whingeing about how your world’s falling apart and actually learn to use them. A hint: You don’t have to wait for your grumpy old chain-smoking editor to show you, either, because he’s a dinosaur and will soon be dead.

But nearly every time I hear journalists talking about, say, real-time messaging services like Twitter, it’s about how they can mine it for data, not how they might adapt their craft to this new participatory delivery mechanism. Or they’re waiting for someone else to show them how to do it.

The people already exploring these new media forms will be the leaders. They may not call themselves “journalists” — and they probably don’t want to, since you’re held in such poor esteem these days — but they’ll be fluent in the new media. And you… well, you’ll be stuffed.

Qik automatically records what happens, so you can watch the replay. We could type in questions, he’d see them on-screen and reply. The lag was only a few seconds.

OK, it’s still in alpha mode, so dunno when this will be ready for real life. But it’s certainly going to be one of those things which changes everything. Again.